Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Emacs on my Galaxy S3

My dreams of turning my cell phone into a Linux hacker's delight is nearly complete: I've managed to get emacs running on it.

Emacs can actually be found in the play store and installed with a couple of screen taps like any other free app. But, like others who tried before me, I was getting a segfault when starting it up. Between my recent Android upgrade and using 8pt font, it now starts up without issue.

Check out these gorgeous screencaps:

Much of the functionality seems to Just Work. Having Bluetooth Keyboard I pretty much essential, as it makes accessing key combinations (be it via the control key or M-x) straightforward.

The big catch so far is that dired doesn't work. This is slightly problematic as I use it all the time, many times without even thinking about it. One alternate solution is to use *eshell* which provides another way of navigating the file system and easily open up files. It's not quite as fast to use as dired, but with tab-completion and aliases it should do the job.

The other thing I need to figure out is the cleanest way to setup my $HOME directory. But I'm confident I can figure that out.